In 1998, a brutal, controversial indie film portrayed a bleak vision of race relations in the US that appears to have predicted a growing 21st-Century movement, writes Tom Joudrey.

A brilliant film emerged from these skirmishes – but its core insight still takes work to unpack. For generations, a persistent myth that black families were irreparably broken by sloth and hedonism had been perpetuated by US culture. Congress’s landmark 1965 Moynihan Report, for example, blamed persistent racial inequality not on stymied economic opportunity but on the “tangle of pathologies” within the black family. Later, politicians circulated stereotypes of checked-out “crackheads” and lazy “welfare queens” to tar black women as incubators of thugs, delinquents, and “superpredators”. American History X made the bold move of shifting the spotlight away from the maligned black family and on to the sphere of the white family, where it illuminated a domestic scene that was a fertile ground for incubating racist ideas.

  • Pons_Aelius
    21•1 year ago

    I remember thinking that a neo-nazi/nationalist movement could never happen (on a large scale) in any Western nation.

    I have to ask, how old were you when you thought that?

    Those already existed in the UK and other western nations for decades.

    This is England is a movie about the skinhead/nationalist groups in the Uk in 1983.

    Hell, The Blue Brothers had a joke about Illinois Nazis in 1980.

    Groups like this have existed for decades.

    • @masquenox
      3•1 year ago

      Yes, but that’s the thing… the media portrayed the far-right as laughable “fringe movements” back then - we didn’t have the internet, and the connection between capitalist societies and the far-right (whose violence protects them) was pretty much hidden from us by the very people who empower the far-right when working-class people get uppity.